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*100 copies limited edition. 2023 sock* When Christopher Shannon (of bands Bart and Possum) and Benjamin Pullia started High Alpine Hut Network, the intention was to explore cosmic extensions of house music. However with the addition of Jason Bhattacharya on drums, HAHN's recording sessions rapidly became a site of experimentation where members would generate raw material through structured improvisation and sheer spontaneity. Through this process, the project eventually evolved into a collabora…
We Now Create - Music For Strings, Winds And Percussion
The most important artists in the history of Japanese free jazz, Masahiko Togashi, Masayuki Takayanagi, Mototeru Takagi and Motoharu Yoshizawa. A solemn and crazy improvisation work originally recorded in 1969! "It was not until 1969, when this album was recorded, that the quality of Japanese free jazz works reached a world-class level. The most important artists in the history of Japanese free jazz feast the solemn and insane improvisation has not faded away even in the present age of 2023." - …
Tigers Are Better Looking
Composer Valtteri Laurell Pöyhönen presents his Nonet formation on We Jazz Records. Their debut album Tigers Are Better Looking is released 3 Feb and the ensemble features internationally renowned Finnish clarinetist Antti Sarpila, plus a strong cast of Helsinki-based musicians from several of the top Finnish groups.
Based on the writings of British-Caribbean author Jean Rhys (1890–1979), the 6-track album is a melancholy, intimate chamber jazz creation. Laurell's music swings, yet he doesn't st…
Circus/Citadel
Finnish bassist Antti Lötjönen returns in February 2023 with his second Quintet East album on We Jazz Records. With Verneri Pohjola on trumpet, Mikko Innanen and Jussi Kannaste on saxes, and Joonas Riippa on drums, Quintet East is a hard-hitting ensemble of Helsinki scene A-listers. The new release sees the quintet work with Lötjönen's inspired new music with remarkable spirit, spreading out on a quest for new sounds and ideas, and returning to base with a fresh batch of acoustic creative music,…
Starting Point
Tip! In 1975, under the oppressive air of military dictatorship in Brazil, brothers Lelo and Zé Eduardo Nazario invited bassist Zeca Assumpção to join their musical experiments in a basement under Sao Paulo’s Teodoro Sampaio Street. As teenagers, the trio had already been playing together in Hermeto Pascoal’s Grupo, alongside guitarist Toninho Horta and saxophonist Nivaldo Ornelas, and it was while working together under Hermeto’s direction that the Paulista rhythm section (as they were then kno…
Searching For The Disappeared Hour
*2023 stock* "Even though they’re often neighbors in the rhythm section, piano and guitar are not typically a good fit for jazz duets. Some of that has to do with the difference between an electrically amplified instrument and a percussive acoustic one, and some with the fact that the close voicings pianists favor are difficult on guitar, while the open voicings guitarists love don’t easily translate to piano.
But as Sylvie Courvoisier and Mary Halvorson suggest on Searching for the Disappeared …
Sara Schoenbeck
*2023 stock* "This record documents long-term musical partnerships; duets with artists who have helped me refine my creative vocabulary. Yet my deepest musical relationship is with the bassoon itself, the kernel of my inspiration. It is the nurturer, the supporter, the quiet glue in an ensemble. It is awkward, huge, and demure. Even as a child, I was drawn to its uniqueness—its textures, timbres, and a sound that inspires movement. While I certainly appreciate orchestral playing in the Western c…
Ancient Songs Of Burlap Heroes
"This album is dedicated to those who recognize living as a heroic act: the occupiers of sunup barstools; the cubicle-planted; the ghosts of Greyhounds; the reasonably sketchy. A burlap hero is one who marches—consciously or not—back to the sea in hopes of making no splash, who understands and embraces the imperfection of being, and in that way, stretches the definition of sainthood to fit." - Nate Wooley
Séances
*In process of stocking* "In order to bear witness one must believe what one sees and belief, of course, is subjective. Knowledge is essentially faith. And the flexibility of human memory, our blind spots (whether empathetic or optic) and our great imaginations don’t make truth any easier to contain. This becomes more evident over time as the pages of history weather and the cataracts of progress cloud our collective “knowledge”. Humans love to forget and to repeat. We fall subject to confirmati…
More Touch
"More Touch is a courageous step and important record from Patricia Brennan, a wonderful vibraphonist who is rapidly becoming one of the most innovative on today’s contemporary jazz scene. The nature of her compositions gives the quartet the chance to stretch and test boundaries, and the musicians respond by adding a unique dimension to her creative vein. Brennan is seen shoulder to shoulder with a talented rhythm team: bassist Kim Cass, who is an expert in form, texture and groove; the skillful…
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes
"I imagined the four ensemble pieces that begin this album as belonging to the repertoire of a speculative musical culture — one potentially not so far removed from my own — whose sonic and lyrical affinities reflect chronic, hazardous inundation, and mystifying betrayal. Without my realizing it at first, they became, in their own way, more-or-less oblique renditions of the Jerome Kern / Otto Harbach standard “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” an object lesson in the transmutation of weather and grief i…
Everywhere to be Lost
*In process of stocking. 2023 stock* "I chose the name "Everywhere to be Lost" as a means of summing up the ideas behind the compositions on the record. My personal growth as a musician is one thing but my growth as a person in general has been a different journey that I want to reflect on through this music. There have been times when I felt lost, times when I needed to assess my purpose and direction in life, times where my self esteem, mental and emotional health has gotten the best of me and…
Healing Suite
*In process of stocking* On November 8, 2015 Jesse Sharps, one of the great composers to emerge out of the Los Angeles progressive jazz scene and an early bandleader in Horace Tapscott’s Pan Afrikan Peoples Akrestra, brought together a select group of musicians at the Mayme Clayton Library and Museum in Culver City, California for special concert to celebrate The Gathering, a historic recording summit that had occurred a decade earlier at Cal Arts in Valencia. This album is a select representati…
Solaire
Ah those child prodigies… Siegfried Kessler, learned piano at 4, gave his first concert at 6, then studied classical music when the discovery of jazz blew everything up. So the pianist played with Dexter Gordon or Joe Henderson, created the cult group Perception and, before becoming Archie Shepp’s long-time accompanist, created his own jewels: recorded in 1971 with Gus Nemeth and Stu Martin, Solaire is the rarest of all. The brightest, the one we want to play all the time and never loose!
Une Bien Curieuse Planète
From 1960 to the present day, from Georges Arvanitas to Laetitia Shériff, or from Manu Dibango to "Mama" Béa Tékielski, everyone has wanted to include François Jeanneau in their team at some point. This, his first album under his own name, was recorded for Jef Gilson’s Palm label in 1975, a few months after ‘’Watch Devil Go’’ by Thollot, with more or less the same cast: Jeanneau on saxophone, Jenny-Clark on double bass and percussion, Lubat replaces Thollot on drums and Michel Grailler is added …
Tra Scienza E Fantascienza
Timeless atmospheres, hypnotic sonorities, minimal arrangements. And a composer gifted with a never ending passion for music, experimenter in his genetic code, innovator by vocation, at ease with various instruments in order to forge avant-garde themes. Piero Umiliani was already forward in building completely new sounds in the late Seventies. “Tra Scienza E Fantascienza” finds his alter ego Moggi experimenting with alternative grooves, electronic music, jazz tunes and soundtrack motifs. One of …
Handscapes 2
At the time of release Ebony reviewer Phyl Garland said "One needn't be a "piano freak" to appreciate a truly new recording. First of all imagine seven gifted and talented pianists sitting down to seven grand pianos and proceeding to tear up these instruments - musically, that is. ...the torrent of sound springing from their 70 fingers is so powerful and majestic as to be unlike anything one has ever heard."
Live...
Tip! "This album features Pharoah Sanders playing some no-nonsense tenor in a quartet with pianist John Hicks, bassist Walter Booker, and drummer Idris Muhammad. Sanders performs "It's Easy to Remember" (in a style very reminiscent of early-'60s John Coltrane), an original blues, and two of his compositions, including the passionate "You've Got to Have Freedom." The musicianship is at a high level and, although Sanders does not shriek as much as one might hope (the Trane-ish influence was partic…
Family Band
Family Band is the eponymously titled 3rd release from this quartet of like-minded friends and collaborators. This is a band in the truest sense, with no leader contributions come equally from Kim Macari on trumpet, Riley Stone-Lonergan on tenor saxophone, Tom Rivière on double bass and Steve Hanley on drums. The group met while studying at Leeds College of Music in 2008, founding the band in 2015.
The album was recorded over two days in early February 2020 by Tim Thomas in an old farm outbuildi…
Your Prayer
Super Tip! Reissue, originally released in 1967. Frank Wright returned to the studio in May 1967 to make his second album using a quintet of players little-known at the time but now legends to free-jazz cognoscenti. Trumpeter Jacques Coursil, who almost made an album for ESP-Disk' himself, went on to the greatest fame of the players besides Wright; alto saxophonist Arthur Jones was not recorded nearly as often as his talents deserved; Steve Tintweis's stint playing with Albert Ayler raised the y…